Edna Ferber | Critical Essay by Joe Dever

Critical Essay by Joe Dever

Edna Ferber is a reportorial novelist with a powerful, encompassing love for America and the people in it. Miss Ferber's skill at reportage and enormous, healthy curiosity about the peoples, places and customs of America have produced a series of popular romantic novels which have been saved from tedium and slick-paper mediocrity by a rich gift of phrase and a warm, fearless social-consciousness. (p. 45)

There is, she tells us [in Giant], much to admire about Texas and Texans…. But over all this thumping materialism, looms the haunting shadow of the "spik," the "cholo" or Tex-Mex. His is the land and the natural resources by birthright; they, historically, are the interlopers, he, the disinherited.

In the gradual disintegration of the Bick Benedict ranching empire … [and] the rise of postwar ideas of social equality … Miss Ferber hints at a...